What are the best practices for designing and outputting text to a vinyl cutter?
I am new to CorelDraw. Should text be converted to curves or contours prior to cutting? If so, what is the technical reason behind that?
In my case, I have been designing in CorelDraw using basic fonts and outputting to a roland printer/plotter. the only way I achieve success is by first converting the text to curves. Why?
Hello Mandm; I always convert anything I want to cut to curves, and remove the fills just using the outline. It depends on the software or the driver you are using to how things work, I'm using a Allen Data Graph cutter and it uses a driver that is setup in Windows as a printer. A lot of the cutters have a 60" cut length limit, and some of the software knows that so it will let you panel your work. If you tell us what program you are cutting with someone that is using that software will probably jump in and tell you how they do it,
Good Luck, George
I have been outputting directly from CorelDraw X6 to a Roland BN-20.
Hi.
I usually Weld the text. It works best most of the time and kills 2 birds with one stone. It joins any connected letters together as to remove intersecting paths. Assign the W key on your keyboard to the Weld function and make it easy.
~John
Thank you for the responses. So that leaves me with the question: in what property is text before welding? What technically takes place during the welding or converting to curves or objects process? Can it be assumed that text, in its native state, is not vector based and contains no usable path information?
Mandm; John has a good idea, when you weld text if you have two letters touching it will make them one joined graphic so the cutter doesn't have the letters cutting into each other, and it converts that text to curves also. With a script if you didn't weld and smooth out the nodes at the join points it can look bad. I always duplicate any text that I want to cut and leave one copy as text incase I need to edit it later.
George